New study shows listening to electronic music while working can boost productivity

The latest in a long line of ‘tell us something we didn’t already know’ stories proved by science (kinda) landed this weekend via research company Mindlab International: listening to music while working can boost your productivity and help you work smarter and that electronic music is one of the best genres to listen to.

Working with PRS and PPL (two of the UK’s governing royalties bodies), Mindlab tested four different types of music on 26 candidates while they performed typical office/desk job tasks over the course of five days: spell-checking, equation solving, mathematical word problems, data entry and abstract reasoning were among some of the tasks.

The results showed that 88 percent of participants produced their most accurate test results while listening to music and 81 percent completed their fastest work when music was playing.

The types of music were dance, ambient, pop and classical. The overall result was that any music had a positive effect over no music at all and that dance music came top of list when it comes to proof reading and problem solving with the highest overall accuracy and fastest performance across the tasks including spell-checking, solving equations and tackling tricky mathematical word problems. Proof-reading, in fact, increased by 20 percent.

Here’s the video below. It’s worth noting that the amount of candidates was far too low to really state the result as proof and that PRS and PPL were involved in order to highlight their services. But hey… A win is a win. If your boss ever takes a shot at you for wearing your headphones and pulling screwfaces behind your computer while working, wave these statistics under their nose and demand a payrise for conscientiousness.